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I'm attending
Gnomedex 7 (2007) at the very nice Bell Harbor Conference Center (BHCC) in downtown Seattle, Washington (right on the waterfront, where the big, beautiful cruise ships dock) today and tomorrow. My compliments to Ponzi and Chirs Pirillo for deciding to put Gnomedex into this very nice venue.
I decided to attend Gnomedex to learn more about the business of blogging, but I'm starting to conclude that Gnomedex is more about the ecosystem... community is actually a better word... of the blogosphere. "Not about the business of blogging..." isn't a bad thing because some of the presentations are mind-expanding, and starting to make me to think about the larger dimensions of what I write about - Broadband Wireless Internet Access.
One thing that's impressive is the number of attendees that have laptops; the percentage of Macs in the audience is easily North of 25%. Some rows it's 100% of the attendees are using laptops. The downside is that 90% of us attendees are using the BHCC Wi-Fi, and their Wi-Fi infrastructure is simply not up to the challenge of all these (often very demanding) users (some of whom were trying to stream video and other bandwidth-intensive applications). The other ten percent or so are using Wireless Telephony Broadband ... if I had one, I would be too. In this situation, email is problematic at best, and blog posting is completely hit or miss.
What's dissapointing is that BHCC is a high-end venue - I've read of very high-end International conferences are held here, and as such, the performance and reliability of BHCC's Wi-Fi should be much better. The technology and the expertise to do such planning, engineering, and deploying the infrastructure certainly exists - imagine the issues Microsoft (what... a mere ten miles East?) has (encountered, figured out, and solved) with their Wi-Fi network! What's even more disappointing is that the Gnomedex staff don't seem to recognize, or acknowledge, the issue. Given that almost every attendee is an active blogger, that attitude is puzzling.
By Steve Stroh
I've known of MetroBridge Networks, an impressive Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) Service Provider (SP) in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada and Phoenix, Arizona for some time. In brief, their business model is to provide mid-to-high-speed Internet Access via Wireless to business and goverment, scaling to enterprises, in mid-to-large urban markets. MetroBridge just completed an Initial Public Offering (IPO) and it seemed a good time to check in with them to discuss their post-IPO plans. I interviewed MetroBridge Chief Technology Officer and Co-Founder Dorian Banks the week of August 5, 2007.
Technology and Products
For access, MetroBridge uses license-exempt spectrum exclusively and has not had any significant problems doing so to date. It formerly used Wi-LAN systems, but in the "death throes" prior to Wi-LAN 's exit from the BWIA systems business to now only licensing patents, Wi-LAN's quality control slipped dramatically, forcing MetroBridge to find another primary supplier for BWIA systems - Alvarion. One of the most impressive traits that MetroBridge notes about Alvarion is that their systems' firmware is very stable and reliable, in marked contrast to other, smaller vendors whose firmware is "perpetually in beta" and much less reliable.
When making use of diverse wireless systems spanning from 5 GHz to
80 GHz, one edge MetroBridge makes good use of is a senior staff
member with a Master's degree in Radio Frequency (RF) Engineering, who MetroBridge uses not only to design high-reliability RF links, but also to troubleshoot RF issues. MetroBridge is making good use of the new 5.4 GHz band in Canada. Banks explains "Using 5.4 GHz gave us some relief where we had saturated rooftops, some with more than twelve radios". Unlike in the US, the strict(er) "Dynamic Frequency Selection, version 2" (DFS2) won't take effect in Canada for another year, giving MetroBridge a larger pool of 5.4 GHz systems to choose from. MetroBridge is exploring use of the proposed 3.65 GHz (3650) band for future US deployments, and has already applied for experimental licenses in some US markets where it expects to complete acquisitions or greenfield deployments. While 3.5 GHz is available for use in Canada (as opposed to the US), speculators bought up all 3.5 GHz at auction and will only lease it or sell it at very high prices. Since MetroBridge has few issues operating in license-exempt spectrum, the (effective) lack of available 3.5 GHz spectrum (2.3 GHz and 2.5 GHz is similarly encumbered) isn't an issue.
Continue reading "MetroBridge Networks, Canadian BWIA Service Provider, Expanding South" »
By mid-1997, I was writing professionally about Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) as a monthly columnist in Boardwatch Magazine.
In 2000, I began writing about BWIA full time in my own blogs, for numerous other publications, and my own subscription newsletter.
From 2008 - 2015, I took a hiatus from writing about BWIA, but my interest in BWIA did not wane. From 2016 - 2020 I worked to resume writing full time.